Synopses & Reviews
Another wild, expansive collection from the eternally surprising Pulitzer Prize-winning poetSmuggling diesel; Ben-Hur (the movie, yes, but also Lew Wallaces original book, and Seosamh Mac Griannas Gaelic translation); a real trip to Havana; an imaginary trip to the Château dIf: Paul Muldoons newest collection of poems, his twelfth, is exceptionally wide-ranging in its subject matter—as weve come to expect from this master of self-reinvention. He can be somber or quick-witted—often within the same poem: The mournful refrain of “Cuthbert and the Otters” is “I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead,” but that doesnt stop Muldoon from quipping that the ancient Danes “are already dyeing everything beige / In anticipation, perhaps, of the carpet and mustard factories.”
If this masterful, multifarious collection does have a theme, it is watchfulness. “War is to wealth as performance is to appraisal,” he warns in “Recalculating.” And “Source is to leak as Ireland is to debt.” Heedful, hard-won, head-turning, heartfelt, these poems attempt to bring scrutiny to bear on everything, including scrutiny itself. One Thousand Things Worth Knowing confirms Nick Lairds assessment, in The New York Review of Books, that Muldoon is “the most formally ambitious and technically innovative of modern poets,” an experimenter and craftsman who “writes poems like no one else.”
About the Author
Paul Muldoon is the author of eleven previous books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Moy Sand and Gravel (FSG, 2002). He is the Howard G. B. Clark University Professor at Princeton.